He plays his usual self, the Dallas native who holds down two high-profile media gigs: TV critic for New York magazine and editor at large of rogerebert.com. He approaches a friend and asks if he wants to hang out. “You can’t do that,” says the dream friend. “You’re opening on Broadway tomorrow night. You’re playing Hamlet.”

That’s when dream Matt realizes he hasn’t even read the play.

It’s a classic anxiety dream, except Seitz isn’t walking into class naked just in time for the surprise math test. Instead he has to play the most famous character in the history of drama.

“It’s a ridiculous challenge,” Seitz says. “It’s my subconscious telling me, ‘Matt, you keep biting off a lot, and one of these days you’re not going to be able to chew it.’”

In addition to his two jobs, he’s written six books and counting. He has raised a son and a daughter. He teaches a graduate seminar on arts criticism at Syracuse. He’s the artistic director of the Split Screens Festival, an annual event celebrating the art and cultural impact of TV. And he doesn’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Everything the former Pulitzer finalist writes is personable, passionate and deeply informed, whether he’s posting about social justice on Facebook or writing a massive profile for New York.

He’s done all this in the aftermath of the sudden, world-destroying death of his wife.

American author and television critic Matt Zoller Seitz photographed at his home in Brooklyn.

(Chad Batka/Special Contributor)

So it’s no surprise his dreams come with high stakes. He lives and writes and watches and tweets at a ridiculous pace and demands nothing less than perfection from himself. But why?

What makes Matt Seitz run?

Before he was one of the most respected critics in America, Seitz would sometimes cut class when he was a student at Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. He wouldn’t run off to smoke cigarettes in the parking lot, or raise hell around town. Instead the kid in jeans, T-shirt and black wingtips — “like my grandpa used to wear” — hunkered down in a room behind the school auditorium, where Octavio Solis was teaching his playwriting class.

“What are you doing here?” Solis would ask him.

“Oh, I just need to catch up and finish this play,” Seitz would reply.

Yes, he cut class so he could write. And write. And write some more.

Even then, he couldn’t stop. This was years before the guy who saw A Room With a View 15 times when it opened at the Inwood in 1985 became one of the most prominent and prolific critics in the world. If you went back in time and told the childhood Seitz this would happen ... well, he’d probably believe you.

“I was trying to be Orson Welles when I was nine years old,” Seitz says.

Matt Zoller Seitz brings his 'Mad Men Carousel' home to Dallas

As a fifth-grader, Seitz wrote, directed and starred in a sci-fi play called The Creature Syndrome. “It was basically a rip-off of Alien and the original The Thing with James Arness,” he says. He also wrote a sequel, but he couldn’t act in it because his character died at the end of the first one.

It all sounds a little like Max Fischer, the precocious wunderkind at the heart of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore. “When I saw Rushmore for the first time,” Seitz says, “I thought, ‘Holy crap! Wes Anderson is plagiarizing my life.’"

Matt Zoller Seitz, right, directing his play The Creature Syndrome in fifth grade.

(Barry White/Matt Zoller Seitz)

Seitz was devouring the art of storytelling and pop culture in early childhood. His dad, Dave Zoller, is a jazz pianist and composer (Matt recently helped him release a Thelonious Monk tribute album, Evidence). His mom, Bettye Zoller Seitz, is a voice actress, singer and teacher. They divorced when Seitz was 6, and Seitz was shipped off to suburban Kansas City to live with his grandparents.

His grandmother would get him into R-rated movies and come back for him later. One time he talked her into letting him see the seedy, sex-filled Looking for Mr. Goodbar. He told her it was a sequel to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

He was hooked on the golden age of horror and sci-fi magazines — Fangoria, Famous Monsters of Filmland, Starlog. (He will soon be a contributor to the relaunched Fangoria). Accompanying his grandparents to the grocery store, he’d run to the magazine rack and read every movie review he could find. He couldn’t get enough.

By the time he moved back to Dallas to live with his mom and stepdad in 1980, he was already a cultural omnivore and a critic in the making.

He was also miserable, mostly due to the emotional chaos in his new home. “Let's just say that that was not a healthy marriage,” he says. “It was a very dysfunctional situation.” He developed extreme insomnia, and started staying up all night thinking about death. He traces his bouts with depression and his anger management issues to these days.

“I felt abandoned, and movies were a great comfort to me,” he says. “The movies were my church.”

To this day, if you name a movie, Seitz can tell you exactly where he saw it for the first time. The last movie he saw in Kansas City before he moved back to Dallas? The Empire Strikes Back. Pulp Fiction and Fatal Attraction? The UA Cine (rest in peace). E.T. and Die Hard? The old NorthPark I and II.

Seitz will be 50 this year. But the tough times remain inside him, somewhere, deep down, even if they don’t explain him like Rosebud tried to explain Charles Foster Kane. Instead, they push him to produce. The perpetual thinking that kept him up as a child? He pours it into his work.

“I don't think it's much of a stretch to say I probably work so much so that I’m not constantly obsessing over trauma, so I can take trauma and turn it into something else,” Seitz says. “It's like the engine that fuels the DeLorean in Back to the Future where they poured garbage into it, and it turns into energy.”

A handsome nerd

Leave it to Seitz to express such feelings in a movie reference. “He’s a cinephile,” says Solis, his old teacher, who has written several plays and worked on the recent Pixar hit Coco as a cultural consultant and voice actor. Solis remembers Seitz as a dashing intellectual, always absorbed in his work.

“He was a real handsome young man, and I could see he had all these girls ogling him,” Solis says. “But he never noticed it. He was a bit of a nerd.”

He didn’t even notice when his future wife started checking him out. After graduating from Booker T., Seitz enrolled at Southern Methodist University, where he worked at the student bookstore. In August 1989 he found himself stamping textbooks alongside a pretty brown-eyed girl who loved movies, books and music.

She complimented him for a piece he wrote for The Daily Campus, about Do the Right Thing and Sex, Lies and Videotape. He didn’t realize she was hitting on him.

“I thought she was really smart and really attractive, but I didn't think that she was interested in me in that way,” says Seitz. “Because why would somebody like that be interested in me? It just never occurred to me.”

Matt Zoller Seitz and Jennifer Dawson

(Jeremy Seitz)

He figured it out eventually, and he married Jennifer Dawson in 1994. By then Seitz was making a name for himself at the Dallas Observer, writing movie reviews with the style and wisdom of a much older critic. This was a golden age at the alternative weekly, and Seitz was at the center of it. He was a young star on a staff that also included current Dallas Morning News city columnist Robert Wilonsky and Laura Miller, who would go on to become mayor of Dallas.

“Matt was the baby genius,” Miller says. “Everything he touched was written beautifully. I mean, he was just out of college and he was writing poetry about movies, and it was shocking. But he was also eternally humble. He never had sharp elbows, never had a big ego. He was always the quietest, most unassuming guy in the room, writing the best stuff.”

Miller and her colleagues often joked about an East Coast paper swooping in and snapping Seitz up, even before he became a Pulitzer finalist for criticism at the age of 25. Then it actually happened. New York Newsday came calling first, but the newspaper folded shortly after it offered Seitz a job. So the Newark Star-Ledger stepped in, which was fortunate, since Matt and Jennifer had already booked the moving truck.

Life was good. Seitz ended up with a pop culture column in the Star-Ledger. They had a daughter, Hannah, and a son, James. They had a nice apartment in Brooklyn. Jennifer was researching nursing schools and planning a new career.

Then, on April 27, 2006, Seitz’s life was torn in half.

He still remembers how heavy his backpack felt.

He was at the Star-Ledger office, writing his review of United 93, when his stepbrother called. “You should come home,” he said. “Jennifer had to go to the hospital.”

Seitz grabbed his backpack, caught a bus and some trains, and stopped at the apartment to drop off the pack. He noticed Jennifer’s desk chair was tipped over. Odd, he thought.

He ran to the hospital. He was guided through the surgery area and into the office of the doctor who tried to save Jennifer. There he saw his stepbrother, who uttered just two words: “She’s gone.” She had suffered a heart attack, and died just one minute before Seitz arrived. The man who lives on the fast track was, in this instance, not fast enough.

She was 35. Their daughter was 8. Their son was 2.

'Symbolic suicide'

Jennifer loved musicals — West Side Story, The Music Man, Gigi. She loved Stephen Sondheim, and she loved Deadwood. Seitz loves the show too and he couldn’t go near it for years after her death. He couldn’t look at a Disney logo without thinking of Jennifer, who wore a Cinderella sticker on her helmet when she volunteered at Ground Zero after 9/11.

She was everything, and now she was gone.

The following months were a blur, accentuated by a lot of booze and pot. And a lot of sleep. “It was a form of symbolic suicide,” he says now. “You don’t have the recklessness or nerve to actually kill yourself, so you’re doing this kind of junior version of that by sleeping all the time.”

He tried a series of antidepressants, some of which worked better than others. He wrote like a demon when he could. He discarded friends who weren’t up to the task of being near his grief. “I’ve got an itchy trigger finger now with people,” he says. “If it’s clear that they’re draining emotional energy from me and not contributing anything in return, I cut them loose. I’m like, ‘You know what? This isn’t working out. I’m sorry.’ It’s like Jerry Seinfeld with his girlfriends. They only last an episode.”

Alan Sepinwall, Seitz’s friend and former colleague at the Star-Ledger, recalls the devastation. “He left the job,“ says Sepinwall, now the TV critic for Uproxx. “He talked for a while about leaving the profession altogether. He wasn’t sure what he was gonna do.”

He had two kids to raise, so giving up wasn’t really an option. He also had other things he wanted to do with his life. In typical Seitz fashion, he links it all back to a scene in a movie.

It’s the moment in Dead Poets Society, when the teacher played by Robin Williams urges his students to seize the day. He takes them to a trophy case, points to a group photo of the school’s past heroes, and tells them what they’re doing now: “These boys are fertilizing daffodils.”

Seitz isn’t ready to do that yet.

Written in flesh

He has four tattoos. On his left hand is the word “Remember.” On his right hand is “who you are.” He got those in 2012, when he was going through a rough patch with a bad relationship. A good friend, the Turkish film critic Ali Arikan, speaks the words whenever Seitz is in a jam: “Remember who you are, mate.” “I should just get that tattooed on my hands,” Seitz finally figured.

In the crook of his right forearm is the Black Rabbit of Inlé from Watership Down. It’s a symbol of death. “It’s to remind myself that life is fleeting and can be taken from you at any moment,” he says. He got that one the year after Jennifer died.

Matt Zoller Seitz's hand tattoos remind him: Remember who you are.

(Chad Batka/Special Contributor)

On the other forearm is a tattoo of a set of keys. Which brings us to the unconventional happy ending of The Matt Zoller Seitz Story So Far. Last year, he got remarried. Her name is Nancy.

She’s Jennifer’s sister.

All Hamlet connections aside, Seitz is a little sheepish about the whole thing. He met Nancy in 1989, when Jennifer brought him home to meet the parents. They were close friends from then on. For several years after Jennifer’s death, Nancy was the first person he’d telephone to talk about a new girlfriend, or life in general.

Matt Zoller Seitz with his wife, Nancy Dawson, on their wedding day next to a photograph of Matt Zoller Seitz and his former wife, Jennifer Dawson.

(Chad Batka/Special Contributor)

“We were confidants,” he says. “I never thought of her in that way, and I don’t think she ever thought of me in that way. Then it was like a buried explosive detonated. I don’t think either of us entirely understands.”

She describes it like this: “It’s like when you can’t find your keys and you spend hours tearing your house apart trying to find them. And then you realize they were in your pocket the whole time.”

So they got matching keys tattooed on their forearms.

James is now in the eighth grade; Hannah is in her junior year of college. And Matt is still pushing himself relentlessly. “For him to now be at the at the level again that he’s at, to have come out on the other side, has been a real relief and joy to witness,” says Sepinwall.

So what movie would best sum up this movie fiend’s life? He relates to the last scene in It’s a Wonderful Life, when George Bailey realizes he doesn’t want to kill himself. Some days, when he’s rushing from one place to another, one task to the next, he thinks of Henry Hill’s frantic sauce-cooking, helicopter-dodging odyssey near the end of GoodFellas. On these days, he’ll put on his headphones and jam out to Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire,” one of the songs that fuel that scene.

Jumping in the fire beats pushing up daffodils. If Seitz lives on the run, he doesn’t mind the sweat. He’s doing things — a lot of things — that help make life worth living.

Matt Zoller Seitz will never be Hamlet. But he’s gotten pretty good at being himself.

Matt Zoller Seitz works on notes on for his upcoming book,The Soprano Sessions, at his home in Brooklyn.